Monthly Archives: August 2024

Stranded Starliner Instructions

This entry was posted in comics and tagged Boeing Butch Wilmore NASA space SpaceX Sunita Williams on by
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Boeing botched the first crewed flight of the Starliner to the International Space Station, but at least they didn’t blow up Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore in the process. The two have been stuck on the ISS months after what was supposed to be a brief stay as part of the test flight.

The empty Starliner will come splashing (or crashing) down to Earth soon without them on board because of a bunch of problems that should’ve been sorted out long before launch.

NASA’s decades-long habit of contracting out operations to sketchy lowest-bidder companies have made them reliant on white supremacist Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Russia’s Soyuz program. Boeing becoming their only other option wasn’t great even before their planes started disintegrating mid-flight.

There should be a NASA owned and operated crewed space vehicle, but that money went to the military’s not-so-secret space drone, the X-37.

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Newspaper Nit Picker Fact-Checks This Comic

This entry was posted in comics and tagged 2024 election Donald Trump Glenn Kessler media on by
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This week the columnists whose whole schtick is “fact-checking” contorted themselves into knots trying to find as many untruths and straight-up lies in this week’s DNC as last month’s RNC. They went so far to claim things he actually did in his first term don’t count because he’s said he’ll be different in a second one.

It would be gullible if they weren’t so obviously trying to smooth over his many disqualifications in order to keep this a horse race.

I focused on Glenn Kessler as the avatar of this whole genre of goofy “fact checkers” who use silly icons and graphics to add some razzle-dazzle to what’ve become essentially opinion columns. There are countless real fact checkers who do the thankless job of verifying the details in actual reporting. But all these bozos do is tediously parse language and figures of speech to grease the wheels of false equivalence.

Trump and his courts are still a very real threat, but you can tell the public is bored of his antics and was itching to move on. Unfortunately, the media is not.

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Democratic Convention BINGO

This entry was posted in comics and tagged 2024 election Al Gore Bill Clinton Donald Trump Hillary Clinton JD Vance Jimmy Carter Joe Biden Kamala Harris Tim Walz on by
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The DNC started last night and only real sickos are watching the whole thing. I’m one of those sickos.

This year’s actually has some relevance, since the Harris/Walz campaign is on a much more abbreviated schedule than the usual presidential campaigns that go on for years before any ballots are cast. There will be corny stuff, because this is a convention full of party die-hards, but the contrast with the RNC’s weeklong hate-a-thon is striking, and hopefully normie voters who don’t follow all this stuff notice.

I did a similar BINGO card for the 2016 DNC for The Nib (RIP) if you’re curious. It is definitely pleasant to be drawing some new faces this time around, and hopefully I can be done drawing Trump come January 2025.

Read the comic at In These Times.

This a large cartoon, and ALT-TEXT can’t cover all the panels, so here is a transcription:

(comic – A grid laid out like a BINGO card.)
Democratic National Convention BINGO
(panel 1 – Hillary Clinton and Al Gore consoling each other.)
Electoral College Support Group
(panel 2 – A hand holding a “CEASEFIRE NOW!” protest sign.)
Pro-Palestine Protester
(panel 3 – Kamala Harris speaking.)
Patronizing the Protesters
Harris, “VOTE! And you might be heard!”
(panel 4 – Laura Ingraham being angry.)
Fox News Freak-out
(panel 5 – An editor crying.)
The Chicago Tribune throws a tantrum for an exclusive interview
(panel 6 – Obama parachuting in vacation gear.)
Obama Returns from Vacation
(panel 7 – A silhouette of a crowd with someone crowdsurfing.)
Abortion Mentioned without no qualifiers
(panel 8 – Front page of the New York Times.)
New York Times Misrepresents Something
headline, “Balloon Drop Flop Good News for Trump”
(panel 9 – Tim Walz with microphone in front of a brick wall.)
Tim Walz Tells a Dad Joke
(panel 10 – A Chicago riot cop.)
Chicago Cops Behave Chicago Copishly
(panel 11 – Cameras surrounded George Clooney.)
Celebrity More Famous than Hulk Hogan
(panel 12 – A camcorder shot of Jimmy Carter)
Jimmy Carter Cam
(panel 13 – In the Harris/Walz campaign font.)
Free Space
(panel 14 – A man in MAGA hat rewrittend to spell KAMALA.)
Token Republican Convert
(panel 15 – A text exchange.)
Fundraising Text Interruption
text, “Donate now to pay for some consultant’s vacation home!”
reply, “STOP!”
(panel 16 – Kamala Harris wearing a Wisconsin cheese head.)
Swing State Pandering
(panel 17 – President Biden looking confused.)
Biden Sundowns
(panel 18 – President rakishly peeking over aviators.)
Dark Brandon Rises
(panel 19 – JD Vance peering over a couch.)
Couch Joke Humped to Death
(panel 20 – Jake Tapper making a paper airplane.)
Cable News Wastes Your Time
(panel 21 – Bill Clinton speaking.)
Bill Clinton Courts the Youth Vote
Clinton, “Hawk Tuah?”
(panel 22 – The word “weird” in a word cloud.)
“Weird” Used So Much It No Longer Sounds Like a Word
(panel 23 – A delegate wearing a novelty t-shirt.)
Random Delegate Becomes Viral Sensation
t-shirt, “I (heart) BOFA DEEZ DEMS!”
(panel 24 – Trump angry and holding a phone.)
Ex-Prez Shares a Deranged Thought
(panel 25 – Kamala Harris emphatically dropping a microphone in front of a backdrop.)
Harris Makes Her Case
backdrop, “No More Trump”

Leaked Emails from the Trump Campaign!

This entry was posted in comics and tagged 2024 election AG Sulzberger Donald Trump JD Vance Kevin Sorbo media New York Times Roger Stone on by
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Someone or some government agency successfully phished the Trump campaign and obtained its emails. They then contacted several media outlets about leaking them, but all refused citing “ethics in political journalism” or some other horseshit.

They famously didn’t do this in 2016, when it was Hillary Clinton’s emails. Back then, everything was published on Wikileaks first, so they had the veneer of covering important documents that were “already out there” despite the illegal provenance. This doesn’t explain why the NYTimes spent months breathlessly covering even the most benign of those emails in the hopes of generating a scandal, or at least a quantity of coverage that implied there was one.

As the polls look worse for Trump, the media will work harder to prop him up. Not necessarily for ideological means, but because a close race is good for readership and advertiser numbers.

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This is a wordy comic, and I’ve had trouble getting alt-text to work with it. Here’s the full transcript:

(panel 1 – Title in the style of the Trump/Vance logo.)
Leaked Emails from the Trump Campaign
(panel 2 – An email from Roger Stone.)
Subject: HACKED!
From: Roger Stone roger@weirdheads.biz
Hey man,
I clicked a link for Nixon nudes (for research purposes only), but it turned out to be a phishing attack.
Just a heads up.
Whoops,
Rog
(panel 3 – An email from Kevin Sorbo.)
Subject: RNC SPEAKING SLOT?
From: Kevin Sorbo K.Sorbs@dlist-divas.geocities.org
Mr. President,
Why didn’t I get a spot at the convention? I was more famous than Hulk Hogan for a few minutes in the ’90s.
No worries though! If you want, I can post a really racist tweet about your new opponent. Let me know.
Kevin
(panel 4 – An email from Steven Cheung.)
Subject: EPSTEIN’S PLANE
From: Steven Cheung Cheung@donaldjtrump.com
Boss,
We’ve leased Epstein’s plane while yours is in for repairs. I don’t anticipate any bad press from this.
Steven
P.S. Because you’ve stiffed so many contractors, none will agree to get the Dershowitz stains out.
(panel 5 – An email from J.D. Vance.)
Subject: WRONG RALLY LOCATION?
From: JD Vance pigboy@donaldjtrump.com
Dear Sir,
No one’s here and there wasn’t any advance work done. Please send me the correct location and I’ll hop on a bus A.S.A.P.
JD
(panel 6 – An email from A.G. Sulzberger.)
Subject: ALL GOOD
From: A.G. Sulzberger nepobaby@nytimes.com
President Trump,
Don’t worry. We’re not going to make a whole thing about your emails because we want you to win.
Maggie says hi.
Dash

Sam Altman’s A.I. Bubble Burstin’ Blowout!

This entry was posted in comics and tagged artificial intelligence Fox News OpenAI Sam Altman Silicon Valley technology on by
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The A.I. bubble’s burstin’, after every tech company spent the past year forcing it into their previously useable products. There’s no consumer demand for this crap, but it’s all they have, and their stockholders demand growth. It’ll join the Metaverse and crypto in the trash heap along with all the processors that were wasted rendering boobs on anime cartoons.

In the world of useful innovations, green energy has been on a feverish pace this year, but it’s boring and requires actual technical know-how, so the tech bros will have to invent a knew scam for their next round of pump-and-dumps.

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Republicans’ Manual for Acting Normal

This entry was posted in comics and tagged 2024 election Marjorie Taylor Greene Project 2025 racism Republicans Stephen Miller on by
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“Republicans are weird.” has gone mainstream after Kamala Harris bluntly stated this obvious fact. Previously, you’d only hear it in alt-weeklies, late night jokes, and all over social media because the mainstream media was too busy doing both-sides coverage to notice how divorced from reality Republican politicians have truly become.

Republicans are struggling to refute this simple line of attack because it is true. Their policies, demeanors, and general vibe are just plain weird. The RNC was a freak show celebrating it before it became a liability! Their attempts to point out Democratic weirdness so far have been focused on quirky individuals who are weird in the cool sense and have neither the desire nor power to impose their weirdness on others.

There are still three months before the election, which is a lot of time, but not long enough for these weirdos to stop being creeps.

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